I had the good fortune of delivering a keynote address at the Web Design 2.0 conference in Las Vegas last month. The conference organizers courageously said I was welcome to talk about whatever I wanted (suckers…). So I gave it some thought, brainstormed a number of things I’ve always wanted to say at a Web conference and came up with the session title and description below. The talk seemed to go over well, from my admittedly biased perspective. So I thought I’d share a summary of what I discussed here on our blog. It’s a little edgier than the stuff I normally write, but I’m hoping you won’t mind. I’ll cover one topic at a time at a completely random schedule dictated by my mood and bandwidth. I hope you enjoy them…

Here’s the session description, for background:

The 8 Things Every Web Team Should Know: Lessons From a Grumpy Web Consultant
Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing
Anyone who has worked in the online space for long realizes that many of the obstacles web teams face have little to do with technology, and everything to do with the damn humans. Why are web projects so easy for some organizations to get right but so excruciatingly difficult for most? Veteran web guru Lance Loveday knows and it makes him grumpy that everyone else doesn’t. Join Lance as he reveals the dark side of web team interactions, the damage it can wreak and the toll it can have on an organization’s success. He’ll share humorous anecdotes based on in-the-trenches experiences and, most importantly, practical tips on how teams can work smarter and more effectively.

#1 Kick Ass or Suck

Either path is OK. But you have to choose.

(Read the full article…)

One of our clients – Ifbyphone - just announced some new functionality that will make it a LOT easier for advertisers to track phone leads by advertising campaign and pull the data into Google Analytics. We're especially excited about what this means for Search Engine Marketing campaigns, although it can be used to track calls from any kind of advertising.

We've always been frustrated when our SEM campaign ROI has been underreported because we didn't have an easy way of telling what phone calls originated from Search. Even in those cases where we had a sense for how much call volume our Search campaigns were driving, we could never attribute the calls to the originating Campaign or Ad Group so we could adjust bids and spending to ensure we were getting the most out of the campaigns.

Some advertisers have developed a basic multiplier they apply to their web leads/sales to account for the lift from phone sales we all knew was happening even though we couldn't measure it. That's better than nothing, but not very precise or actionable.

Some more advanced advertisers have set up custom 800 numbers for various campaigns so they could get more granular call data. But in most cases they had to manually marry up the web data with the phone data, usually weeks or months after the fact. This enabled some better intelligence, but still fell short of having one system tracking everything in real time.

But with Ifbyphone's new system, now we can achieve the vision of having web and phone lead data reported in ONE system. And not just any system, but the very popular Google Analytics. See Thomas Howe's review of this new capability from Ifbyphone here: Simple and Brilliant.

More on how it works on the Ifbyphone blog here: Phone Mashup for Tracking Call Data in Googe Analytics.

More detailed information will be coming out shortly.

As with many things, it will take some good planning and upfront work in order to get the most out of this new capability. But the bottom line is that this solves a big problem for a lot of advertisers. If you drive a decent amount of call volume from your campaigns, you owe it to yourself to check out this new tool. It's an easy and low-cost way to make sure you're spending your advertising dollars more intelligently. Who can argue with that?

During her crazy adventure to Finland for the Persuasive Technology conference (more on that here), CLM’s Amy Greer met a fascinating gentleman from the UK named Richard Sedley. Richard works at a UK-based agency called cScape managing the Customer Engagement group. Amy introduced me to Richard when she returned and, in an attempt to brush up on my transoceanic diplomacy skills, we’ve been conversing ever since.

Recently, Richard graciously asked CLM to participate in the Customer Engagement Survey he runs in conjunction with E-Consultancy. Having seen the people who participated in the past surveys (like Andy Beal and Avinash K), we jumped at the chance. You can see the summary report from the previous surveys here.
So I’m putting out the call to all companies (including agencies) to take the survey. It only takes a few minutes. I found it to be an eye-opening experience.

Take the survey

SMX East is happening Oct 6-8 in NYC, where I’ll be speaking on SEO & Usability. This promises to be one of the biggest and best Search conferences.The friendly folks who run the SMX events are letting speakers offer a $150 discount off all-access passes. Just comment on this post or email info (at) closed-loop-marketing.com if interested and we’ll send you the discount code. Please look me up if you’ll be there. SMX East site

This is a follow-up to a post I wrote last April - Why the Google / DoubleClick Deal is Brilliant - when Google announced they were buying DoubleClick. I made a number of predictions at the time and thought it would be interesting to see how I fared. Turns out I did pretty well overall, although the jury’s still out on a few predictions.

I’ve given myself a grade for each of these predictions. Self-grading seems unfair, so let me know if you disagree with my grading scheme.

(Read the full article…)